Prosecutor doesn’t believe father who shot daughter’s boyfriend dead will be charged

The District Attorney’s Office in Houston, Texas says that no charges will likely be filed against the father who shot his teenage daughter’s boyfriend dead.

Prosecutor Warren Diepraam told FOX 26 that “[w]hat was going on in the person’s mind at the time of the shooting what they found out after the fact isn’t going to matter a whole bunch. They’re looking at what he was thinking when he made the decision to shoot.”

The decision to shoot, according to police, was made by the 55-year-old homeowner after his 4-year-old son informed him that there was a strange man in his 16-year-old daughter’s bedroom. It was 2:20 a.m., and the homeowner immediately grabbed his gun and entered his daughter’s bedroom to find her under the covers with an unknown teen.

He allegedly told the teen not to move, and police say his daughter initially claimed not to know who the teen was. At some point during the discussion, the father perceived the teen to be moving for what could have been a gun and shot him dead.

The teen was unarmed, and his daughter later confessed that the dead teen was her boyfriend, and that she had snuck him into her bedroom.

A neighbor told FOX 26 that although he didn’t know the family — “they just moved in,” he said, “I had never seen them before” — it “doesn’t sound like it had to end that way at all. Seems like something that could have been talked about with his daughter, that’s shocking.”

About the Author

Scott Eric Kaufman is the proprietor of the AV Club's Internet Film School and, in addition to Raw Story, also writes for Lawyers, Guns & Money. He earned a Ph.D. in English Literature from the University of California, Irvine in 2008.